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Robert H. Thomas

A brief, but important, decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

In Sikorsky v. City of Newbergh, No. 23-1171 (May 2, 2025), the court held that the plaintiff adequately pleaded a regulatory takings claim which was based on Tyler v. Hennepin County, where the U.S. Supreme Court held that

Screenshot 2025-05-04 at 11-03-11 1033 Exchanges Advanced Strategies for Optimal Tax Deferral ALI CLE

Want to learn of some of the options available to property owners whose land is taken by eminent domain (or, even more sadly, destroyed by a disaster)?

Then you should sign up for next week’s ALI-CLE webinar, “1033 Exchanges: Advanced Strategies for Optimal Tax Deferral.”

Here’s a description of the program:

When property

We had to read the facts of the Tennessee Court of Appeals’ opinion in City of Pigeon Forge v. RLR Investments, LLC, No. E2023-01802-COA-R3-DV (Apr. 20, 2025) a couple of times over, just to make sure we were understanding what was going on. But the effort was worth it, just because of the unusual

Partial taking for highway project. You know what that means: severance damages. And you also know that often means a “general or special” benefits fight over how the remainder parcel may have been improved by the project, and whether these benefits can reduce the severance owed.

Before-the-project condition: undeveloped land on a frontage road with

Here’s more on an issue we recently covered involving Texas’s “depopulation” of captive white-tailed deer in order to curb Chronic Wasting Disease. In the earlier opinion, the court held that the owner of a deer-breeding facility did not have a property interest in the deer, and thus could not assert a due process

There’s a lot of detailed legal analysis in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court (Eastern District)’s opinion in Pignetti v. Pennsylvania, No. J-11A-2024 (Apr. 25, 2025). But in the end it boiled down to a simple concept.

The case was about what property constituted the larger parcel. As the court put it, where “the condemnation of

The California Supreme Court has agreed to review and resolve a lower (California) court split regarding the standard of review a court should apply in challenges to a government taking of a privately-owned public utility.

In Town of Apple Valley v. Apple Valley Ranchos Water, No. E078348M (Feb. 13, 2025), the California Court

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Check out the new report by our Pacific Legal Foundation colleagues Kyle Sweetland and Brian Hodges, “How to Protect Property Rights from Improperly Assessed Exactions” (Apr. 2025).

This research in brief shows how exactions grew and increased home construction costs over a 16-year period. It provides a history of exactions, showing how